BROSSARD – Has Alexander Ovechkin reached the end of his rope? Or is the Beast simply plunged into a sleep from which the Canadian would have no advantage in waking him up?
With nearly 900 goals to his credit, playoffs included, the captain of the Washington Capitals has deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt. The fact remains that the circumstances surrounding his visit to Montreal are special.
After three games, Ovechkin is still looking for his first goal. No real story here. Professional scorers often produce in sequences. This one probably stands out a bit since it occurs at the very beginning of the calendar.
What’s more unusual is that he hasn’t put a single shot on target in his last two games. He took five shots against the Calgary Flames on Monday and four more against the Ottawa Senators on Wednesday, but they were all blocked defensively or missed.
For ordinary mortals, it would be a banal sequence that would not be worth paying attention to. But for the guy who threatens to break Wayne Gretzky’s record of 894 goals, he’s an anomaly. Ovechkin had played 1,347 regular season games before starting this one and this had never happened to him before.
“There is a first time for everything,” replied the imposing striker, smiling, when this statistic was mentioned to him after training at the CN Sports Complex in Brossard. There was no time to subject him to a polygraph, but he later claimed he was unaware of this unusual detail in his rap sheet until this week.
“As a player, you want to shoot, you want to score goals, you want to create moments for your teammates and for yourself. But like I said, there is a first time for everything. ”
After three games, Ovechkin ranks 11th among the Capitals having created a starving 0.16 expected goal according to the model from the advanced statistics site Natural Stat Trick. But in his defense, he is not the only one looking for himself at the start of the season. The team he is part of has only scored three goals. One belongs to Matthew Phillips, a diminutive 5-foot-7 forward who had just three games of NHL experience before this season. Another is in the name of 22-year-old Connor McMichael. The record for Nicklas Backstrom, TJ Oshie and Evgeny Kuznetsov is still blank.
Finding a way to unlock these thirty-somethings is one of the first challenges for new coach Spencer Carbery.
Since the start of the season, Ovechkin has mainly been paired with Backstrom and Oshie. On Friday, Carbery concocted new trios on which we notably saw his captain with Phillips and Dylan Strome. Kuznetsov pivoted a unit with McMichael and Oshie while Backstrom was the center of a line completed by Sonny Milano and Tom Wilson.
“We decided to shuffle the cards a little,” Carbery explained. We liked certain things we saw with the experiments we tried in Ottawa. The presence of [Phillips] alongside Stromer and Ovi could give us some speed on the wings. We’re going to try that. ”
“We’re trying to find chemistry right now. It’s not all negative, but it’s obvious that we need to score more goals. You have to find different ways to create more attack. We like our top-9, we believe that these trios have the potential to produce every night. This is the result we are trying to achieve. ”
Publicly showing himself to be “dissatisfied” with the quality of his game, Ovechkin expressed his desire to “lead by example”. Knowing that the number 8 with the yellow laces is not used to fasting for very long, this could be a bad omen for the Canadian.
Last season, he was also shut out in his first three games. He let off steam in the fourth, shoving two goals and two assists down the throats of the Vancouver Canucks. He eventually finished the year with 42 goals.
The ravages of time spare no one, it’s true. But these numbers suggest it might be wise to wait a bit before giving too much weight to the theory that Ovechkin has reached his expiration date.
